Increasingly, supermarkets and other retail stores have adopted the practice of packing groceries in thin plastic shopping bags. These plastic bags have the advantage of including a handle which is graspable by the user. Thus, the bags can be grasped by the hand of the user, in contrast to brown paper bags which generally have to be carried under the arm.
While such plastic shopping bags have proved popular with grocery shoppers, they do have some disadvantages. When heavily loaded, the handle of the bag is particularly apt to cut into the hand of the user grasping it. Furthermore, since the handle is designed to be grasped by the user's hand, the hand is encumbered to the point where the user is unable to perform any other activities with the hand, such as retrieving car keys, unlocking a car, or opening a door. Additionally, it is cumbersome to grasp a plurality of such plastic shopping bags by their handles.
Bag carriers are known in the prior art. For example, see U.S. Pat. Nos.: 759,056; 5,026,105; 3,262,727; 5,150,938; 645,317; 3,251,622; and 2,153,212. While these patents show various types of carrier handles for carrying one or more bags or cartons, all of them suffer from the same disadvantage. They must be grasped by the user when in use. Accordingly, the hand is disabled from other uses.
Thus, it would be desirable to have a means of carrying a plurality of loaded plastic shopping bags that left the user's hands unencumbered, and did not have to be uncomfortably grasped by the user. It would be particularly advantageous to have a way to carry such bags that is easy, comfortable and convenient for the user.